Publishers Ward and Lock made a fortune selling Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

This was a title they acquired after her husband, from whom she’d contracted syphilis and ran out of money.

As a sideline they published the travel books known as Red Guides. As rail travel boomed so did the popularity of these reliable volumes. If you can find a second hand bookshop you can certainly track one down.

I recently found their guide to Oxford. Dating from 1923 it sits on my desk, chunky and ancient as a VHS tape.

Adverts aside - there’s a fine one for “Eastern Foam - the Cream of Fascination” - most of its 294 pages are about our great university. The city’s municipal buildings claim a mere five pages with the Town Hall and city churches snatching brief paragraphs.

A photo of Cornmarket Street shows Burger King as it once was - a branch of Fuller’s Tea Room, stomping ground of the Suffragette movement.

Even in 1923 the guide bemoans the approach from the railway station - although back then they wouldn’t have passed a large building which resembles something my children have made out of Lego.

Then the guide mentions a building that recently closed - Peel’s Big Game Museum. Oh my giddy Aunt I think - doesn’t that sound fun?

Charles Peel was exactly the kind of eccentric, Victorian lunatic I would have invited to my Burns Supper last night only to find myself hiding the whisky the moment he staggered in and tried to shoot the haggis. For Peel was a marksman.

Why, he argued, would any man slave away in a shop when he could simply emigrate to the colonies and spend his days blasting elephants?

In books such as the indispensable Hunting Polar Bears he promoted this as the lifestyle of choice for sophisticated Victorian gents. Peel’s collection of trophies opened here at 12 Woodstock Road in 1906.

Visitors to the Big Game Museum could gawp at over 150 animals and skulls including a hippo, an African elephant and a giraffe named “Gerald“ - exactly like the one in the children‘s book Giraffes Can‘t Dance, except with exit wounds.

When the museum closed in 1918 Peel offered the entire collection to the City of Oxford as a gift. What did we do? We turned it down.

The whole lot was packed off to Devon like a taxidermist‘s Noah‘s Ark - never to grace our streets again. No wonder Ward Lock’s authors had so little to say about us by 1923. Not an elephant or hippo in sight. I’ve read how Greece want the Elgin Marbles back. I want the giraffe back.

I want to be on the top of a double decker bus driving up Woodstock Road and see Gerald’s head sticking out of the window, looking back at me, just waiting for me to pull the trigger.